Cultivating the garden of the soul with humility

I was first introduced to Harry Emerson Fosdick through a quote: “… real Christians do not carry their religion; their religion carries them. It is not weight, it is wings. It lifts them up, it sees them over hard places. It makes the universe seem friendly, life purposeful, hope real, sacrifice worthwhile. It sets them free from fear, futility, discouragement, and sin – the great enslaver of men’s souls. You can know a real Christian when you see him, by his buoyancy.”

What a powerful description of our faith, I thought, and what an amazing image, as I remembered watching parish volunteers make 100s of sandwiches, pack them into lunch bags and then into boxes to deliver to those who waited for them at an ecumenical center in town. They power walked throughout the morning, with a spring in their step, propelled upward and forward like Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

I wanted to know more about this man, who I would discover was an American clergyman, a Baptist minister who often preached in the Presbyterian Church. He was a proponent of liberal Protestantism, and felt the Christian faith had room for people of many opinions regarding Christian doctrine.

While surely, Harry and I would have disagreed about many things, I was certain I would have enjoyed the conversations and the opportunity to gain his insights on what weighs a Christian down, taking the spring out of his step.

I think we would have been in agreement that one of the greatest impediments to being lifted up by faith is a lack of humility and our tendency toward self-absorption.

In fact, in his influential book in the emerging field of pastoral counseling, “On Being a Real Person,” Fosdick wrote, “At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.”

How different is such a person – swaddled in pride and enamored only of his own opinion and enjoyment – from our Lord, a babe swaddled in the simple clothes of humble birth, whose life was a sacrificial offering of love for each one of us.

At every time of year, the heart of our faith is the humility of the Nativity; God, the creator of all things, born a vulnerable infant into a stable full of animals and the care of a young, inexperienced mother chosen by God.

It was this paradoxical love of our Creator that Paul tried to explain to the Corinthians: ‘God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).

When St. Teresa of Avila founded the Discalced Carmelite Order, she identified three virtues that must be lived in her communities – love of neighbor, detachment from created things, and humility, with humility being the foundation.

She also stressed that true humility is not possible without self-knowledge, which we seek when we purposefully examine our own sinfulness in the light of God’s perfection.

In her book, “The Interior Castle,” St. Teresa writes, “Self-knowledge is so important that, even if you were raised right up to the heavens, I should like you never to relax your cultivation of it; so long as we are on this earth, nothing matters more to us than humility.”

Or, as beautifully expressed by another Carmelite, “Every garden requires good soil in order to be productive; in the garden of the soul, that soil is humility.”

The Apostle Paul’s words and St. Teresa’s wisdom remind us to look in the mirror so we may grow in the good soil of humility and remember whose children we are.